In the last two weeks, I have fielded dozens of inquiries about hosiery. Not that I mind answering endless emails on the same subject, but there are so many other fashion faux pas to be written about, I would like to move forward. With that said, I am resurrecting a previous post that pretty much covered it all – pun intended!

So here we go – the Fall conundrum – hosiery or no hosiery?

During this transitional time of year I am continuously bouncing off questions about tights, pantyhose, stockings, L’eggs Eggs or whatever you call them.

The debate continues and I hear it all. “The millennials don’t wear stockings, why should I?” Hmmm, let me think about that answer before I stab myself in the foot.

To wear or not to wear hosiery remains a contested issue. Changes in fashion and workplace dress codes have caused some women to forgo hosiery for bare legs, while other women claim pantyhose are still essential. So, who is right?

Let’s start with your company and their dress code. If if is in the rules, you must play by them. Another consideration is well…your legs! If you have a great pair of legs then perhaps you accentuate the positive and bare all. However, if you play co-ed soccer on the weekends and your legs are a tad banged up, the decision seems obvious, let’s disguise the liabilities!

Then of course, we need to talk about weather and peep toes. I don’t know about you but when it is 32 degrees, naked skin is painful and the last thing I am thinking about grabbing are peep-toe shoes. Those babies need to be packed away for the winter.

If you are on the hosiery side of the fence then it is seasonally time to incorporate those babies into your fashion statement either as a quiet canvas or a trendy statement.

Once you decide to wear or not to wear hosiery, the bigger question is where to buy them –CVS, Amazon, Lord & Taylor, Nordstrom, Costco, even the train station. The options are endless and are based on what is convenient and what is in your budget. Do the homework to find the best option, then you are good to return to that particular retail shop throughout the season.

What should you pay? Women seem to be at a loss when it comes to defining, selecting and purchasing hosiery. Some think they should pay $2.99 and some think they should pay $40.99. Yes Lucy, the prices are all over the place – navigate the choices within your budget. I have clients who only shop at Neiman Marcus for their clothes and others who go to Target for their hosiery. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to the selection process. Ladies are way more adept at choosing a bottle of wine.

Here are a few informational tidbits. We’ll go from minimal to ultimate bondage and include a few other textile finishes in between.

Ultra Sheer
Features: Made of fine nylon, ultra-sheer hosiery requires extra careful handling. These nylons are the best choice for allowing your natural skin tones to shine through.

Day Sheer
Features: Made from stretchy nylon that clings gently to legs. Less sheer, more durable than ultra-sheers. Perfect for everyday office wear.

Opaque Tights & Pantyhose
Features: The main difference between opaques and tights is the weight. Tights are typically heavier and less sheer than opaques. Tights are usually made of cotton, wool, or nylon/Lycra. Opaques are usually nylon/Lycra or microfibers.

Regular PantyhoseFeatures: Made of nylon and available in various style options, typically with either a sheer or opaque brief.

Control Top Pantyhose
Features: Made with spandex, the control top adds compression, which provides you with mid-section and hip control. Several levels of control top choices are available including light, medium and turbo!

Body Shaper Pantyhose
Features: The full monty! Made with spandex, body shaper pantyhose offer a longer line control top which covers thighs in addition to the mid-section, bootie and hips. Like control tops, body-shapers are available in varying levels of control.

Control Top & Support Hose
Features: You have the torso control and the leg support that you may need.

Need more help? Grab a copy of my book, Confidence Is Always In Style, where I will walk you through your own DIY closet edit and help you assess your wardrobe by category. Be sure to use the coupon code BA50  to reduce the price by 50%! Now that’s trending!

Are Pantyhose Still A Thing? was last modified: October 6th, 2017 by Doreen Dove

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Doreen Dove
Doreen Dove

Doreen Dove empowers women to use style as a tool to take strategic control of their image. She is an image consultant, personal stylist, professional speaker and author. Doreen coaches women to live fully engaged with confidence, knowing they are communicating the best version of themselves to further their personal and professional goals. Her services include closet edits, personal shopping, virtual styling, small group workshops, corporate and keynote presentations. Engage with Doreen on a complimentary 30-minute call to determine how she can help you 'dress with purpose'! www.DoreenDove.com/freeconsult

2 Responses

  1. Victoria Reply

    I still wear hosiery almost everyday for work and even on the weekends also. I just prefer wearing them then going bare legs and I do have very tone legs as I am a runner. With my career I think it is more professional to wear them I wear pantyhose or thigh hi stocking and when it gets colder I wear tights. I wear Hanes or Donna Karen and a few other brands buying cheap pantyhose is why most younger ladies don’t like to wear them I have tried cheaper ones and they are uncomfortable and you really need to try a few brands to find the best fit for you, and I don’t see much of a difference in wearing leggings some are thinner then my tights that I wear with a skirt while there wearing them with nothing over them. I do feel it’s more of a generation thing I’m 48 so I grew up wearing them and continued in college till I started my career back then it was required but I felt comfortable with wearing so I never stopped and don’t think I will stop. The biggest thing you need to do is get a pair that fits and close to your skin color I mostly wear nude or jet black I think that’s the main colors that you need and tights I do get other colors and some patterned ones. I don’t pantyhose or stockings will ever go away.

  2. Sylvia Seymour Thomas Reply

    Here are my feelings about women going bare-legged nowadays. Historically, human beings with good taste and self-respect and respect for others would make them appear “nice”, or as well as they could, while in public. However, the evils of various worldwide political and religious and corporate socialist climates of the 20th century led to the protest culture of the 60s, which I feel was a good thing.

    However, the downside of the 60s culture was that many hippies dressed in rags and made themselves look as horrible as possible, as part of their social protests. Many would not bathe and often smelled really foul. Hence, casual culture was born. However, casual culture is not really very casual, and is very loaded in hidden and often very dishonest motives. So I feel casual culture is pretentious as best. And it leaves anyone without a good sense of etiquette guessing how to properly interact with other human beings in a society too.

    Nevertheless, ever since the 60s, pop-culture people, who mindlessly follow fads and fashions, have been been dressing worst and worst ever since, literally going out of their way to show they have no self-respect whatsoever. Such women make themselves look “easy” and without any standards or self-respect whatsoever.

    And so anyone remaining who does show self-respect is often antisocially ridiculed and not seen as chic or in vogue or in fashion. So in America, we have become less and less a free culture and for the sake of so-called equality, which actually means we have succumbed to homogenization or sameness. So the self-respecting Lady who still shows discretion and self-respect and appreciation for Her Womanhood, is thought of as an old hag — a Woman of yesteryear.

    Nowadays, the degradation of rap, disco and pop music is in vogue, where the only words you ever hear in music is just a few four-letter expletives and n*gga, over and over again. Even black people are taught to hate themselves by modern rappers. So we see all the little boys nowadays walking around with their pants down around their ankles, as though they were nothing more than barnyard animals herded and ready to f*kc anything that moves. This is clearly brutal disrespect towards women, which has pretty much nullified everything that the pioneering feminists of the 20s and 60s had fought to give us in their societal protests.

    And the modern women who are also brainwashed by this same patriarchy and mindlessness of pop culture and all its deplorable degradation have likewise followed suit: hence the modern woman, like their male rapper counterparts, with their pants down around their ankles, goes out bare-legged, as though she is ready to screw anything that moves also. Such women are merely going along with the temperament of rap culture that women are nothing more than mere cum dumpsters for the sexual convenience of selfish, ego-centric males. Women who fall into this trap will always end up living extremely miserable and unfulfilled lives, indeed.

    So as I see it, bare-legged women in public is the same thing as barnyard male pigs running loose with their pants down around their ankles. So we have female neanderthals for the male neanderthals. Really, if mindless sheeples are going to take it this far, why even wear clothing at all while in public? Why not just all of us, from now on, just go out in the nude? Bare-legged and pants down to the ankles is really pretty much the same thing as being nude!

    Unfortunately, we have no written records of why human beings began donning clothing 10s of thousands of years ago. Perhaps it was cold outside and we had less fur on us as our evolution progressed. However also, maybe it was found out by the wise persons of the stone age that hubris in humans, and excessive obsession with their sex often led to countless many turmoils and troubles in their early primitive societies. So maybe it was not shame that caused early humans to cloth themselves, but it was the fact that even by then sex was “old news” and that human ego needed to be tempered for the sake of human beings getting along in a society of their peers.

    I feel only a dumb idiot, who is out of touch with their own humanity, would shame one’s gender, but a wise person would see that human ego running riot in society would likely lead to people violently killing one another back in those stone age days. Maybe their were wise persons who thought that such brutality was unnecessary! So a little bit of temperance and self-restraint was added, so humans could mutually survive and get along better together. Hence clothing and modesty was born!!

    So while I agree that every woman should be proud of her own natural beauty and even accentuate it according to her own personality, but at the same time, good taste, some modesty, self-respect and respect for others, and basic social manners and etiquette might be in order to balance it out.

    As I understand it, hose was developed for women since forever. Even men once wore them in the middle ages too. But as hem lines grew shorter from the late 1800s onwards, that really did not give women the license to just bare all and show all, like these modern day rappers are doing, with their pants all down around their ankles, even masturbating in public too, which is now becoming more and more common with these lowlifes. So women wore hose, stockings or pantyhose, to cover their legs, while their hemlines grew shorter. Hence such women still protected their modesty, yet showed (and celebrated) their natural beauty at the same time.

    Most women of the 60s wore hose with their dresses and skirts. It is true that some few women were dressing in rags that the drug culture had fostered, that was going on at the time too. But even most of those women who were part of the protests back then, still showed self-respect and did not throw themselves all out in public and indiscriminately bare all.

    When you think about it, women and men who feel some childish need to excessively show off skin like that are really insecure, and are looking for someone to applaud their person. So such people are making other people responsible for their own prepubescent insecurities, which I feel is sick.

    It sort of seems to me, that if human evolution was ever getting better since the renaissance, over the past 400 years or so, the past 50 years now, it is clearly going backwards and patriarchy is now worst than ever.

    As I see it, pantyhose is a symbol of Femininity, regardless of who is blamed for creating or marketing it. And since the flappers girls of the 20s, women have been abandoning their gender ever since, trading it out to be “honorary men”, all the while, not really gaining their independence, liberation and freedom out from under patriarchal tyranny either.

    Male-based, male-centric conventions and institutions are not the solution to societies ills. Women protested those conventions in the 20s and 60s, and even seemingly made some strides. However, when modern women succumb to the patriarchal notion of doing away with their self-respect, and going bare-legged, then it is as though women never got the national right to vote in the first place.

    I feel it is high time for women to abandon all conventions and institutions of patriarchy and push forward under their own Light. The legacy of what L’eggs once was, a truly Feminine company, needs to come back and become the banner and torch by which women need to proudly march forward.

    I always felt Elvis Presley died because he had no self-respect. He let himself hang out of his shirts on the stage like that. I feel he was a talented musician and singer and entertainer, but he was also coked out of his mind on drugs and under the pressurized spotlight of the pop-culture media blitz. No one could have survived that, and it is amazing he even made it to his 42nd birthday. However, Jim Morrison and others soon followed his same demise, because none of them had any human self-respect either.

    So little boys with their pants down around their ankles and women who have no self-respect who go out in public bare-legged, well, I feel they all get what they deserve. I feel learning, growing up and maturing is part of life. It is the same thing for a species to evolve over time as well. Human hubris is always death culture, because such persons are too cowardly to face and live life. So they pretend their “human features” mean something more than what they really do.

    I feel a race of species of beings who refuse to get along in a society of their peers and show self-respect and respect for others deserve to all become extinct, due to the constant world war they create through their unfounded and unmerited and unbridled hubris running riot.

    In Mother Natures world, any species that cannot adapt to its conditions, including its mental conditions, will be doomed to extinction. Women who support and enable the childishness of patriarchal rappers and their extremely lowlife, idiotic, inhuman, barnyard animalistic culture, who go out bare-legged, like their male counterparts with their pants down around their ankles, all get what they deserve.

    We each create our own karma by the choices we make in life. I feel we can all show some self-respect and respect for others, when we are in public together, by showing some good taste, proper manners and etiquette, and keep ourselves modest, not all hung out like stupid animals in the wild. Hose on a woman accentuates and augments her natural beauty, if she is not wearing pants. If a woman is wearing pants, at least also, wear socks or knee-highs.

    But when wearing a skirt or dress, if pantyhose or tights are too irritating to the crotch, then thigh-highs or garters might be in order. But a bare-legged woman in public is just as lowly and scummy to me as an inhuman rapper is with is pants down around his ankles masturbating in pubic.

    If you really feel that you need to go out bare-legged, then just do not wear any clothing at all. This way, as human evolution is progressing here, we can all more easily tell which are the human beings and which are the mindless sheeples following the fashion and fad crowd of pop-culture.

    -Sylvia Seymour Thomas

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